Our Manifestos

Last weekend I sat down to watch the Champions League Final between Real Madrid and Juventus. Historically, this has been a prime example of ‘Event TV’; a huge must-watch sporting occasion – shown live on broadcast networks. A genre that traditional broadcasters have held up as a final unassailable bastion against the efforts of Silicon Valley to take over the living room. However, no longer it seems.

After scrolling around and finding that only BT was showing the game, the familiar complexities of navigating today’s TV landscape began. Although a BT customer, I didn’t have access to the right package but I noticed its coverage was live and free on YouTube. With multiple remotes in hand I switched from Freeview via a Humax box to the TV apps on my Sony TV. I then launched YouTube and fiddled with the sound settings and there it was: full-screen UCL action.

Now while far from being a slick user-experience this felt like a moment when the tech titans had finally breached the last defences of traditional broadcasting. It’s been a long time coming with Google launching its first salvoes at the traditional broadcasters almost ten years ago before launching into its ownhardware venture with Sony. Since then, there have been...

A couple of weeks ago, I was running a digital strategy session in Poland for a group of very smart advertising folk. We were talking about different ways to engage senior execs in networked media issues and I mentioned a recent experience I'd had when asked to go and speak to a Grand Fromage at a financial services organisation. I explained that, prior to my chat, the only brief I was given was : ‘he wants to know what’s going on but says if you talk about technology he’ll walk out or go to sleep’. Slightly daunted, my approach was to stick to business issues I suspected the GF was very close to and then mention a few points about how each was changing as a result of technological trends. It seemed to work in that he stayed in the room – and awake. Back at the digital strategy sessions during the coffee break, one of the more experienced agency folk approached me and excitedly asked what the ‘answer was’, following my chat with the banking executive. I was slightly confused and responded that there wasn’t really, 'an answer'. However, I understood what was meant by the question. A lot of people...

Like many independent web workers, I sometimes find it tricky when people ask me what I do professionally. The day-to-day reality is that I research and analyse digital trends that I think are interesting and help like-minded clients work out if and how they are relevant. However, people don't always find that helpful. So sometimes I say that I work with marketeers and brands that feel overwhelmed by technology. Which, I suspect, can sound patronising. But it shouldn't. Feeling overwhelmed is a perfectly understandable reaction as, rather like the rain in the UK at the moment, technological change can seem unrelenting, which for many people is disturbing. I recall a session I ran earlier this year when an executive told me she was worried that the pace of digital change was eventually going to make her redundant. Not because her job was going to disappear but, despite being a smart, accomplished individual she felt she didn't have the time to keep up with the latest bits and bytes. Once again, this is understandable and the individual in question is certainly...

John Lewis, the UK department store chain, has created a very cute Christmas TV ad that continues its tactic of playing on people's heart strings to rise above the yuletide shopping onslaught. My attention was drawn to the commercial by a Telegraph journalist I follow on Twitter who added that even his hardened hack colleagues had been moved to tears. How could I not take a peek? So over I went to YouTube to watch the ad (two hundred and fifty thousand views and climbing) and to see if I could pass the dry lacriminal test. (I couldn’t, no one can). @hwallop also noted that the first showing of the ad would be on the following Saturday night during X-Factor, and indeed I glimpsed it for a nanosecond as I steamed through one of the show’s giant ad breaks at 60x normal speed. Now I recognise that my own media consumption habits aren’t a perfect microcosm for the country at large. Not everyone will be guided by Twitter to the degree that I am. However, I am a John Lewis customer (who isn’t?) and I suspect that as Web TV grows in the UK, my own experience of the ad will become more normal, not less. Web TV I hear you cry!? But YouTube isn’t Web TV. It’s YouTube - where dogs skateboard and babies giggle. Well not anymore it isn't. Sharp-eyed VC Mark Suster spotted that...

‘Big Data’ is the phrase of the moment intechcircles which probably means it will be appearing on the to-do lists of marketing folk soon. The expression refers mainly to the oceans of information being poured continuously onto the open web and social networks by ever more connected consumers (aka people). This tsunami comes in the shape of comments, images, scans, tweets, likes, views, posts, videos and a kaleidoscope of other digital expressions. However, whilst people's everyday lives are providing a big piece of the pie, the scope of Big Data goes much further. Less obvious but just as vast are the intelligence flows that stem from our web browsing behaviour or location signals from smartphones. Other component parts include corporations publishing market information , governments opening up public data for others to use, or vast social platforms that encourage smart developers to weave new applications and services. The result is a share-and-compare economy where people, companies and organisations trade digital views, opinions and information in order to help make decisions - commercial or otherwise. As ever, this creates challenges and opportunities for marketing and brand folk. But there’s no shortage...

In August of this year, Marc Andreessen, the man who built the first commercial web browser, wrote that, ‘software is eating the world.' Yet, he noted, companies continue to underestimate the impact modern technology is having on their markets. Andreessen suggested this myopia might be down to bad memories and burnt fingers following the dotcom boom and bust, when many outlandish promises about the future were made and broken. Additionally, he cited a lack of appreciation about the speed of change that continues to take place around us and the subsequent dramatic shifts in the landscape for companies, brands and organisations. For instance, Andreeseen believes the rapid uptake of smartphones that's driving global access to the web will create vast online markets of five billion people. Furthermore, reaching these giant markets is becoming easier as the burgeoning capacity and efficiency of cloud computing continues to drive down the cost of running web services. ‘Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming’, advises Andreessen who is now one of the world’s most influential technology investors. It strikes me that his comments accurately capture the current mindset of...

As digital tectonic plates continue to shift and once separate media sectors merge onto a single global platform, the terrain for brands and marketing definitions remain in a state of flux. Just take a few recent examples. Last week Facebook indicated it’s no longer a social network but a 'platform', while Twitter reconfirmed it’s dropping the social tag in favour of a new guise as an 'information network'. Leaving some questioning, if even Facebook and Twitter are dropping the label, what ‘social’ actually means in context of marketing; other than the constant buzz of a global bazaar. Additionally, big technology players are constantly redefining themselves and their markets. Amazon, the one-time online book shop, confirmed it is going into direct competition with Apple, the one-time desktop computing manufacturer, with the launch of the Fire tablet. The reason being that both increasingly seek to extend their credentials as global media players offering music, TV and films. Meanwhile, Google, the one-time search business, has bought Motorola, the one-time handset manufacturer, to bolster its own planned entry into the world's TV markets; whilst simultaneously becoming an alternative to a credit card provider by launching Google Wallet. Elsewhere, Hulu, an online television service that was established by the US TV networks as a defensive strategy to see off Google’s YouTube, is being sold off because it success is undermining the revenue model of the owners' traditional businesses. (Ironically, the possible buyers include Google, Amazon and Yahoo). Even the idea of images and photographs is being redefined as demonstrated by the plight of Kodak, one of the...

Recently I met someone who described their specialism as Twitter strategy. Now while I wish the individual in question the best of luck with their offering I also thought it was a small example of the silo-mentality that is hardwired into the marketing business. One that, in my humble opinion, is taking the industry in the opposite direction to a world that is becoming increasingly intertwined. Everything that has occurred in the world of technology and marketing over the last five years will play out over the next twenty. In short, all media will become networked in the same way that all PCs were brought onto a single network by the Internet and then the web. On the supply-side change is being driven by powerful forces such as Moore’s Law and rapidly improving connectivity, the two mega-trends that between them are building the much-discussed cloud, into which all media will eventually be drawn. On the demand-side the growth of smartphones, tablets, connected TVs and other groovyware is providing the complementary lifestyle changes in people’s behaviour. The result is an increasingly sophisticated media ecosystem of which brands will remain a key aspect, providing people with signposts and trusted offerings – just as they always have. The overarching characteristic of this ecosystem is...

What's the ‘New Normal’ for global brands? By which I mean that following the collapse of global finance, the ensuing reshuffle of the world’s powerhouse economies and rapid growth of vast technological platforms, what do global brands care about and to which companies and sectors are they turning for assistance? I keep returning to three thoughts. Firstly, that corporations and brand-owners’ aims haven’t really changed a great deal. They want the same business outcomes, such as awareness, sales, loyalty and product differentiation, that create and support Mega-Brands and the shareholder dividends that follow. Secondly, media and marketing remains in the throes of huge waves of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter alluringly called ‘creative destruction’; the painful process by which one economic order is gradually replaced by another. In the context of media and marketing, creative destruction has come in the form of digital IP technology breaking open the barriers between previously separate industries to create a single global platform upon which vast new networked media oceans surge. Finally, most global corporates have been quietly shifting their investments into fast-growing markets for years. Now, as growth falters in Europe and the US, these booming economies seem to promise a golden future. Many such as Brazil, India, China and Indonesia see the creative destruction of technology, media and telecomms as a welcome opportunity. They invest enthusiastically in new...

Media companies used to exist in their own separate waters. The newspaper industry was the newspaper industry. TV was TV and so on and so forth. Each of these unconnected territories had a few super-predators that were top of their respective food chains, untroubled by the small fry. This was also true of technology and telecoms. However, in recent years, the tectonic plates have shifted to reveal a single networked media ocean into which all media, technology and telecomms companies are gradually being drawn. The result is a gory realignment of the food chain as these corporate animals, so used to roaming their own backwaters as unchallenged predators, thrash around to establish who will survive. Some will maintain their status. Others will be usurped by sleek new species and left to wonder where it all went wrong. The tectonic shift was, of course, driven by rise of the Internet and the Web, and more recently the Moore’s Law-powered growth of online computing power aka the cloud. The reason the undertow is so powerful is because, increasingly, this new networked media ocean is the sea to which consumers themselves are heading. But why didn’t every big media and technology beast notice the plates were shifting to create this vast new habitat? Simply because they had...